Employee #1 and his employer were building a wooden pier, supported by wooden piles approximately 30 feet long. The piles were driven into a creek bed by a pile driver using a free-falling drop hammer. The 2,000-pound hammer was raised and lowered by a hoisting drum. All the equipment used was installed on a 30-foot-long-by-12-foot-wide steel barge.
They were driving their fourth pile when the barge raised from the creek bed. Employee #1, while attempting to keep the pile within the leads, was drawn into the leads under the hammer. The hammer was supposed to be in a dogged-off (stationary) position, but fell on the employee, crushing him. He was pronounced dead.
What went wrong?
The proximate error was not locking the hammer in place, since its rapid fall caused the fatality. Less clear is what caused the barge to raise from the creek bed in the first place. Was the barge large enough for the weight and boom height of the pile driver? Was the pile driver properly centered on the barge?
Any one of those factors could have caused the accident if it didn’t conform to safe usage guidelines. And if the barge raise up high enough to tip the pile driver off the surface, both Employee #1 and his employer could have been injured.
Reprinted from Marine Construction Magazine Issue I, 2023.
